"Rock'n'roll is a vehicle to express the emotions you are not allowed to use in everyday life. We shouldn't waste rock and roll. Rock should be looking at some of the big questions. At its best, it's an art form that inspires, sometimes teaches, sometimes threatens. Its only crime is when it bores."
Michael Been
Michael Been, The Call's singer/songwriter, was born in Oklahoma City but migrated to California before forming The Call with Scott Musik. Sin and salvation were staples of the diet that The Call served up. Been thought "that every fault in the world is within him" and said that he had had "hundreds of born-again experiences" needing them because he is dead a lot of the time. "I believe in truth. Whatever is necessary for a person to experience to find the rock bottom, to know the darkness of his life, that's right. A lot of our music is confrontational, it deals with the dark side of life because that teaches us something."
Been’s focus on the dark side of life led to the band being labelled as negative and may have restricted their overall impact – their greatest success was with the deliberately life-affirming single 'Let the Day Begin' which reached number three in the American charts. Another limiting factor, in the UK at least, was that they were perceived as playing the ‘Big Music’ when the likes of U2, Simple Minds and The Waterboys had fallen out of critical fashion. The fact that Bono and Jim Kerr contributed to their albums didn’t help dispel this perception. In reality, though, the band that the Call most resembled (never more so than on Red Moon) was The Band, and both Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson contributed to their albums. Support was also lost among American Christians (something Been had been at pains to build up – he sent copies of the single 'I Still Believe (Great Design)' to Christian radio stations together with a signed copy of the Apostles Creed) when Been appeared as the apostle John in the Martin Scorcese film The Last Temptation of Christ. He was asked to take part as a friend of Scorcese – The Call were reputedly Scorcese’s favourite band – and got involved because he “wanted to show something of the struggle Christ had”. However a lot of people wrote to him saying, “Your records helped me when I was down. But now you’re involved in this film I can’t listen to them anymore.”
The Call’s original career may have ended with Red Moon but it ended on a high, that album together with 1986’s Reconciled representing the peak of their work. Combining literate lyrics with powerful anthems and genuinely encompassing despair, ecstasy and the stages in between, The Call are "perhaps the most underrated band ever".
"A preacher and a teacher, Michael was always much more than your usual 'ten-a-penny' careerist '80s rock star. As driven as he was with his beliefs, he was far from sanctimonious and always a hoot to be around. He had a similar soul that one perceives in true American greats such as Robbie Robertson, but he also had the wickedly spirited comedy of
John Belushi draped all around him."
Jim Kerr
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The Call - Let The Day Begin.
